... aka: Nosferatu: Vampire in Venice
... aka: Vampire in Venice
Directed by:
Mario Caiano (uncredited)
Augusto Caminito
Luigi Cozzi (uncredited)
Klaus Kinski (uncredited)
Maurizio Lucidi (uncredited)
There's no other way to start this review than to delve into
the disastrous production history to this Italian semi-"sequel" to German director
Werner Herzog's acclaimed NOSFERATU THE VAMPYRE (1979). In
fact, this may be the mother of all troubled film productions. Producer / writer
Augusto Caminito (who you will begin to pity as this story goes forward)
originally hired director Maurizio Lucidi. He shot a few crowd scenes in
Venice before the script had even been completed, but Caminito had a change of
heart and decided to go with a new director, even though contractually he still
had to pay Lucidi his full salary first. He then hired Pasquale Squitieri,
who was best known for a series of profitable Euro-crime films, to direct and write the picture. However, Squitieri's ambitious screenplay exceeded the
budgetary limitations, so Caminito decided to stop working with him (also having
to shell out his full salary as well). Caminito then hurriedly hired a third
director, Mario Caiano (who had made the minor Gothic horror classic NIGHTMARE CASTLE with Barbara Steele two decades earlier) so shooting could
immediately start. Star Klaus Kinski was supposed to reprise his vampire
character from the 1979 film, but the actor (sporting long white hair and [sometimes] rat-like teeth) refused
to go bald or wear the same ugly / pale monster makeup, which explains why the
vampire looks nothing like he did in Herzog's film. Even worse, Kinski got into
a violent dispute with Caiano the first day of filming, threw a mirror at his
face and called him a "hack" and "a shitty director." Caiano walked off set and
refused to come back unless Kinski apologized to him. Needless to say, that
never happened. Caiano would become the third director to leave the
project... and the third to take his full salary with him.
Facing disaster and a possible lawsuit from an Italian TV network who
helped co-produce the picture, Caminito (who had almost no experience in the
director's chair) then decided to take the helm himself so he wouldn't have to
pay a fourth director. Luigi Cozzi played film doctor, was a consultant
and was assistant director to Caminito through much of the shoot (all sans credit), though he actually shot much of the film on his own. Aside from compromising the vampire's horrific look, Kinski caused numerous problems throughout the shoot, including being rude / insulting toward nearly the entire cast and crew, throwing the film completely off schedule, threatening to
quit multiple times, refusing to rehearse his scenes, physically assaulting
several female cast members and demanding one of the already-cast actresses (Amanda
Sandrelli) be fired. The producers became so desperate after awhile they had
no choice but to cater to every one of the insane, temperamental actor's ridiculous
wishes, including allowing him to go off with a small crew and shoot over 10
hours of footage not even in the script. Of all that footage, which was little more
than Kinski wandering around the streets of Venice at dawn, only about 3 minutes worth actually ended up in the finished film.
Not surprisingly, this whole thing is a huge mess. The plot only
occasionally makes sense, the continuity is sporadic at best, the pacing
fluctuates from being too slow to too rushed and the characters are
thinly-drawn, uninteresting and many of them disappear from the film for long
stretches of time after being established as protagonists early on. The only
thing the film really does a good job at is capturing the appropriate mood,
though to its credit it does quite an exceptional job at that. Thanks to
cinematographer Tonino Nardi, there are lots of beautifully composed
shots of the canals, the mist-covered cobblestone walkways, the old buildings,
the sky at various times of day and night and birds flying around in slow
motion. Often these shots are used to tie the film together when the continuity
is going right off the rails. Scenes
seem to cut abruptly at many points before completion and the film always
reverts to the same thing: cutting to a lovely image of the city in an
attempt to keep us from noticing. Luigi Ceccarelli's music score; sort of
an elegant-classical-meets-80s-synth score ("inspired by" Vangelis), is also
quite interesting. Most of this film's accolades end right there.
Things open with wonderfully moody shots of Professor Catalano (Christopher
Plummer) solemnly standing at the steer of a small boat floating through the
canals; often cast in shadow along a hazy orange sky. Catalano also narrates;
explaining that he's dedicated his whole life to the study of vampires and that
he's come to Venice at the request of a young princess who wants him to help
investigate her families cursed history. Upon arrival, Catalano meets beautiful
Helietta Canins (Barbara De Rossi), the princess, who wastes no time
showing him the cellar crypt of the family mansion where a long-dead descendant
rests. She believes it's Nosferatu in the crypt, but he supposedly fled the city
200 years earlier because of the plague so the Professor is skeptical. As it
turns out, Helietta is correct. The family hold a séance with help from a
powerful medium (Clara Colosimo), Nosferatu is resurrected, comes
crawling out of his crypt, walks the beach and stumbles upon some oddly
cooperative gypsies, who let him feast on a young gypsy girl to give her
immortality. The linking of the gypsies to the vampire is never explained and after
this brief scene the idea is dropped altogether, which is a recurring theme with this film as you will soon see.
Other characters are introduced but none of them are developed. In fact,
this movie does such a terrible job introducing them that we have no clue who
any of them really are. Donald Pleasence plays Don Alvise, a cowardly
priest and family confidant who basically just stands around in the background
in a low-key fashion until his final scene allows him to rant, rave and wildly overact.
His character serves no real purpose. Yorgo Voyagis (from DAMNED IN VENICE [1978]) is Dr. Barneval, another family friend who seems to
be the romantic interest of Helietta. He and Helietta go to a costume ball
together and romantically kiss... and right in front of Helietta's friend Uta (Elvire
Audray), who also happens to be the doctor's wife. Uta seems to
have her own lover (Giuseppe Mannajuolo) on the side but no one seems to really care one way or another. I couldn't
make heads or tails of any of these people or their relationships since they
never once bother to explain it to us. Maria Clementina Cumani
Quasimodo plays Helietta's grandmother, who lurks around acting sinister until the vampire pushes her out a window so she's impaled on an iron fence; a fate parallel to that of a priest (Mickey
Knox) seen in one of several brief flashbacks.
Helietta is established as being the reincarnation of Princess Letizia;
Nosferatu's lost love, but once he finally bites her, the actress strangely disappears
from most of the rest of the movie. The film then switches its attentions over to
Helietta's kid sister Maria, who's played by Anne Knecht, the replacement
for the actress Kinski got fired. Knecht was not an actress; she was the
girlfriend of Voyagis and was on the set visiting him when Kinski decided to "cast" her in
this film... never mind the fact she was black!! The vampire mythology here is
different than usual. Nosferatu is impervious to stakes through the heart, can
walk around in daylight, and handle crucifixes, casts a shadow in a mirror and only
has to sleep for 24 hours every 24 days. None of this bodes well with the
death-obsessed vamp, who apparently wants nothing more than to be put out of his
misery. Professor Catalano explains that there are really only two ways to kill
a vampire. The first is for them to drink mercury; "the only natural element
capable of killing a vampire." The second is through the love of a "consenting
virgin" (?!); which can put his soul to rest for "a thousand years." This is
where the character of Maria supposedly factors in. She leaps from a bell tower,
is swooped up by Kinski and he carries her through the sky Superman-style (!)
back to the crumbling abandoned mansion he's been squatting in. All of this ends
up having absolutely nothing at all to do with this film's frustrating
non-ending.
Plummer seems to be the only one of the trio of name value stars trying to give an actual performance and his Van Helsing-esque Professor is set up strongly in the
first half of the film with a potential redemption / hero arc. The character is
dying and has spent his whole life studying and looking for vampires and now
he's finally stumbled across a real one in the twilight of his life. So what do the filmmakers ultimately do
with him? After Nosferatu makes a cross burn his hand, the Professor simply gives up and leaves town defeated without even bothering to confront the vampire a second
time! Several of the other characters then decide to try to stop Nosferatu. Though
four of them head to the castle, we only actually see what happens to one of
them as the other three vanish into thin air to apparently join De Rossi, Audray
and Plummer in the magical land of Anticlimaxville.
Much of the production information in this review is from the book Italian Horror Movies, written by Cozzi and Antonio Tentori. The
section on this film also explains a troubling incident between Kinski and one
of the actresses. Though the female half isn't named, it's obviously Ms. Audray
since part of the scene actually described remains in the finished film.
According to Cozzi, the script called for Kinski to grab his victim and bite her
on the neck. Instead, he charged at her "like a wild animal," actually beat her
up (for real!), ripped off all her clothes and undergarments and started biting
her right on the vagina! Audray fled the set crying and Kinski maniacally
screamed "Bitch!" at her as she ran off. Afterward, Audray understandably
refused to do any more scenes with the crazed actor, which may explain why she
disappears from the rest of the movie. Kinski also apparently manhandled De
Rossi during their nocturnal "love sequence" and went beyond the call of duty by ripping
off her nightgown, fondling her crotch and then squeezing her breasts very
hard. This may also explain why De Rossi is m.i.a. through a large portion of
the film.
After debuting at the Venice Film Festival to scathing reviews in 1988, the film
ended up flopping in its subsequent Italian theatrical release and played only
limited engagements elsewhere. There was no official release here in America to my
knowledge, but an English-dubbed version was released elsewhere, including in
the UK on the Vestron label under the title Vampire in Venice. It was
also released on VHS in numerous other countries under titles like
"Dracula in Venice," "Nosferatu, Prince of Shadows," "Nosferatu, the Return" and
"Vampires in Venice." Germany is one of the few countries to get the film in
reasonably good shape on DVD (on the Midnight Movies label) under the title Nosferatu in Venedig.
★★
